> Dr. Van Etten didn’t expect much from the water she had scooped from a random dock next to the highway
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.
> It looks like a primitive chess engine, trying every move, no matter how stupid, until it works.
The Morris worm happened in 1988 [0].
I mention this b/c people like to say "the agents wanted to hack" but really this is just a few levels above the "keep trying the same port on multiple machines".
Not DOS but another dad in my town works for one of the opera houses in NYC.
They have what are called "supertitles" [0] so that people can follow along with what the opera singers are actually saying. There is one on the back of each seat in the theater.
As near as I can figure, it's basically hundreds of LCD displays on some kind of bus network and connected to a computer via serial connection aka "D pin connector".
The software only runs on Windows XP and he has to keep finding old Windows XP machines on eBay in order to keep it working. I think he also has a couple hard drive images of the working OS + software.
I had suggested using a USB to D pin adapter and then use an LLM to sniff the protocol and then reverse engineer it.
His response:
"It HAS to work correctly. In 30 years we've never had an outage with the old system."
I've never played but I was under the impression that you generally want to "do what you said you would do" given that the game has multiple rounds and decisions are iterative.
e.g. if you stab your allies in the back early, you fall into a "trust hole" that is probably hard to climb out of.
Then again, "slow playing" your alliance until you stab them in the back at the very end is probably a good strategy. It may only work once though.
That also sets up the "bigger game/meta level" of having a reputation across multiple games where people get to know your style and how trustworthy you are.
Reminds me of quotes from old business books "They were very much a 'handshake seals the deal' kind of operator".
(although there are also stories of nefarious folks abusing the hand shake folks)
I've been using GLM-5.3-Flash on Ollama Cloud's $20/mo plan and using OpenCode's free models (mostly Muse Spark 1.3) to do a LOT of work and I would say that I hit a daily or weekly limit MAYBE once a month.
My usage plus reading about how tokens just keep getting cheaper and cheaper sounds like a great thing for "the rest of us" but not sure how the frontier AI labs are going to pay back all of their debt if this is the case.
(I get the inference is currently very profitable but if it's a race to the bottom on token pricing, even that won't last much longer)
Do the reading b/c there's a machine that has done all the reading so it's hard to add value if you maintain the anti-intellectualism of 2010s software dev.
So many people treat git commands like magic words, and then are terrified when they mess up their repo (example in this xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1597/)
> She ended up flirting with her GoPro cameras, hallucinating the sound of shamans beating drums, and accusing her electrical equipment of poisoning her with sound waves.
There is an interesting phenomenon called "the Firehouse Effect" that is similar but on a group level.
The idea is that if you take a group of humans and isolate them, they will begin to believe wilder and wilder ideas and communicate those ideas amongst themselves. This happens because the group is not routinely "reconciling" with broader society which in turn is slower to adopt new ideas.
It's named after firemen who would spend a lot of time together in firehouses.
and do you ever look at the code afterwards? The 'software factory' gets exponentially nastier the longer it is kept running without someone with actual experience 'shoving it' back in shape ever so often ... and even then.
I've done the same but using Notion, and I've found really interesting to let the agents write a small "Dev Blog" post on a Notion page with what they built in the sessions, with screenshots, videos etc.
Also working with parallel sandboxes is a must: I use a manger session that read/write the issues from Notion and dispatch them to workers, it handles similar work to the same box to minimize merge conflicts.
PS: I'm using AgentBox for this (discl: I'm the author, free OSS): npm -g i @madarco/agentbox but now also Claude is releasing Projects (still rolling out) and Cursor had cloud agents for a while
trying to code while driving is a terrible idea, and it is not changed by whether complaining it about it is virtue signalling
"is a lot higher than the chances" - you killing people due to such stupid idea is far far worse, so that despite it being less likely it has far greater negative impact
Same here. Inspired by both, I used to delivery videos over torrent to in door machines since at that time, there's no CDNs (or it was difficult to get one).
I've seen this used for distributing container images in networks with awkward network topologies (e.g. a lot of bandwidth within a site or sub-site but limited bandwidth to central registries)
There are stories of companies asking their employees to bring back soil and water samples from wherever the employees go on vacation.
The idea is that this is a somewhat random sampling of locations that the company wouldn't have thought of on their own. Plus, it's possible that one of the samples has some novel chemical or biological compound that could lead to a breakthrough discovery.
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